Free Amazing Disgrace by James Hamilton-Paterson Page A

centuries . (Such are the insights afforded a jaded exile by a view from the forty-third floor, or whichever this is.)  
    Millie is herself also standing at the window with the short, thick telescope she carries everywhere, a prop too naff for further comment. It is three o’clock in the afternoon and she is wearing a garment that only plebeian queens like Noël Coward ever affected, a sort of cross between a housecoat and a dressing gown all in crimson Chinese silk with dragons rampaging over her knobby little chest. The empty sleeve is pinned up to the shoulder with a dramatically large safety-pin. Thespian, that’s what she is, I realize with surprise. I haven’t actually seen her these past six months, owing to my having been busywriting her pestilential story, and in that time she has changed. Gone is the plucky grandmother from Pinner. The creature standing at the window languidly surveying her domain is, good Lord, queenly .  
    ‘Gerry darling,’ she cries, turning and coming forward to gather my two hands in her one. Where did she learn that? How can she possibly avoid a guest-star appearance at Chichester Rep’s next Christmas panto? She leans down to pat the thick folder of manuscript sitting prominently on a coffee table. ‘Your book! So wonderful. So naughty, too. The things you so nearly say. Delicious. Now sit down and tell me all about yourself. It’s been an age.’ The telescope hangs from a lanyard around her chicken-skin neck and bounces heavily off the dragons as she sits down. I notice scurf on the shiny brown shins that gleam beneath the hem.  
    Numbly I grope for a chair. Am I going to have to play Miss Mapp to Millie’s Lucia? Or worse, Georgie Pillson? I decide resolutely to remain the last of the Sampers.  
    ‘Millie! You look like Lord Nelson got up as Somerset Maugham. All you need is an admiral’s hat and a cigarette holder.’  
    At this she frowns slightly, reminding me that she dislikes levity unless it’s her own. ‘Same old Gerry,’ she says with a glint. Too late it occurs to me that she may never have heard of Somerset Maugham and probably dares not ask in case the truth is even worse than she suspects. Some West Country delicacy , perhaps, like a Cornish pasty or Devon cream, only more disreputable?  
    ‘Well,’ I reply cautiously, ‘the same old Gerry has gathered that, kind as you are about his book – our book, your book – you feel there’s the odd bit of re-jigging still to be done. I’m sure you’re right. When one bakes a beautiful cake it’s essential to get the final artistic details of the icing absolutely spot-on, don’t you think? Decorations are vital. The least sign of sloppiness can have a subtly discouraging effect on the mind of the person eating the cake and can actually change its taste. Finally,everything comes down to where you put your little silver balls. Like life, really.’  
    (Here I am going to employ a technique that is wholly novel in modern British writing and leave it up to the reader to supply Millie’s foul language. From this point on and throughout the rest of the book you should simply pepper her sentences with the sort of expressions that make you feel jaded and slightly ill to see in print.)  
    ‘It’s not your little silver balls I’m thinking of,’ says the raddled yachtsdiva tartly. ‘Although in my opinion quite a few have found their way into your cake. Now, all the stuff I told you in those long conversations we had with your tape recorder – you know, about my family, my accident, how Beldame came to be built and so on – all that stuff’s okay, obviously. No – I’m talking about your fantastic stories, how I only learned sailing in my thirties on Ruislip Lido, that sort of thing. Those are definitely not okay. I can’t imagine who the hell you’ve been gossiping with. It wasn’t bloody Clifford, was it? I warned you not to believe half of what that man tells you. He likes his yarns – it’s